You just missed America Recycles Day

November 15 was America Recycles Day, a trashy holiday sponsored by the American Chemistry Council and the Keep America Beautiful people, in turn sponsored by, among others, Anheuser-Busch, Pepsico, cigarette companies Altria and the Santa Fe Natural Tobacco company, all of whom are devoted to producing plastic, putting stuff into disposable bottles and filling our gutters with butts. A day devoted to convincing Americans to pick up what is essentially corporate waste, the byproduct of a culture of disposability.

This is the day they make tear-jerking videos about how a bottle really wants to be a bench, overlooking the ocean somewhere.

We have been covering America Recycles Day for many years; here is a roundup of some of our posts on the subject.

Today is America Recycles Day, the annual greenwashing homage to a culture of disposability

I want to be recycled/Screen capture

The sponsors of this grand event have a new campaign, "I want to be recycled" in which a plastic bottle cries out "I want to be a bench." It's an interesting bit of anthropomorphism, kind of like a human considering reincarnation and saying "I want to be a slug", for as William McDonough and Michael Braungart pointed out in Cradle to Cradle, there's not much else that bottle can aspire to, and to be a bench it has to be mixed with fungicides, stabilizers, chemical and mineral additives and more. Not to disparage slugs, but it really is a lower form of life. More in TreeHugger

Lets call recycling what it is- a fraud, a sham, a scam perpetrated by big business on the citizens and municipalities of America.... Enough. Throwing stuff away isn't green, even if it goes into a blue or green bin. It is still throwing stuff away. More in TreeHugger